FreeBSD on a Mac Mini Intel?

[Kelly Martin]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:08 AM, Andrew Gould <andrewlylegould at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 9:08 AM, John Almberg <jalmberg at identry.com> wrote:
>
>> On Nov 21, 2008, at 11:42 PM, Ian Jefferson wrote:
>>
>>  Is anyone running FreeBSD on a Mac Mini Intel?
>>>
>
> You could always test it using VMWare Fusion........and then let us know
> ;-)
>
> With a vm, you wouldn't have to worry about Apple's hardware booting
> process.

I have several FreeBSD 6.x servers in production running as VMs in
VMWare Fusion, they work great. Portable, too. You can set Fusion to
open your FreeBSD server upon starting, then you just put Fusion in
your Login Items (under your Account settings in the System
Preferences) so that it starts when the Mac Mini boots up. Give almost
all the resources to FreeBSD and you'll have a fast machine.

The other way to do it would be with Boot Camp, to enable booting to
FreeBSD using the Mac's EFI architecture (there is no BIOS, only an
emulated BIOS). You'll need that to be able to boot other operating
systems like Windows, I have never done it with FreeBSD but do a
search on the web for "mac mini freebsd boot camp", others have gotten
it to work. Start by telling the mac you want to put Windows on... The
only caveat, it used to be that when booting the Mini you'd have to
select the FreeBSD partition manually to start it up..a. maybe Apple
already fixed Boot Camp though so it remembers what you want as
default so that it's no longer a problem. Please let us know if you
try it.

kelly